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Japan Times
LIFE / Travel / HOTELS & RESTAURANTS
May 24, 2013

Japanese afternoon tea; Beatles and disco dinner party; eat off Kutani porcelain

Japanese afternoon tea at Peninsula
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 24, 2013

'The Tree'

Ten-year-old Simone (Morgana Davies) has just lost her dad, felled by a sudden heart attack, and she finds solace high in the branches of a massive fig tree that grows outside her home under the big skies of rural Queensland. Sometimes, late at night, she thinks she can hear his voice; her mother, Dawn...
COMMENTARY / World
May 24, 2013

Global call to women standing on the sidelines

Hardly a day goes by without a news story on some violation of women's rights. In recent months, appalling incidents of violence against women and girls — from Delhi to Johannesburg to Cleveland — have sparked public outrage and demands to tackle these horrific abuses.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
May 23, 2013

Guitarist Dustin Wong brings singer Takako Minekawa out on a 'Toropical' journey

Guitarist Dustin Wong hesitates for a split second. It's a pause that would go unnoticed during most other sets, but Wong has spent the last 40 minutes seemingly in a trance while playing guitar and looping the notes via an array of pedals in front of him. The flurry of interlocking sounds he's produced...
BASKETBALL
May 23, 2013

Japanese women face Griner during preparation for upcoming tourney

A 23-point loss to the WNBA's Phoenix Mercury in a Sunday exhibition game in Phoenix was the first big test for the Japan women's national basketball team as it prepares for the 25th FIBA Asia Championship for Women.
Reader Mail
May 23, 2013

Hitler cited his religious faith

While there does seem to be some disagreement among historians about the degree of Adolf Hitler's religious beliefs, I think it's inaccurate for Jennifer Kim, in her May 16 letter, to claim his Catholicism was abandoned in his youth.
Reader Mail
May 23, 2013

Inventors of human rights?

Jennifer Kim, in her letter of May 16, seems to be doing a bit of an Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto special. She appears to be suggesting that the mass murder of heretics [Cathars] was necessary at the time. She seems to take the apparent wrongness of their teaching — which supposedly took the anti-life...
COMMENTARY / World
May 22, 2013

Why China's developmental state says no to liberalism

Modern history is the story of how liberal democracy, originating in Britain and America, spread around the world. This may sound like an absurd fantasy. In actuality, this Whiggish narrative of progress underpins most newspaper editorials, political commentary and speeches in the West, and frames larger...
COMMENTARY / World
May 22, 2013

Five myths about Benghazi

The events surrounding the deaths of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012, look dramatically different depending on your politics. Republicans tend to see a cover-up and a scandal. Democrats see an attempt to damage President Barack Obama and...
COMMENTARY / Japan
May 22, 2013

Why Abenomics hurts women

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's acknowledgement of the unleashed potential of women should herald a new beginning for female empowerment in Japan. Yet his proposals to encourage more women to remain in the workforce actually may do more to hurt their prospects by merely reinforcing existing prejudices toward...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Entertainment news
May 21, 2013

X Japan waxes lyrical at Madame Tussauds debut

This Monday, members of the seminal metal band X Japan were in Odaiba rubbing shoulders with the likes of Brad Pitt, Lady Gaga and AKB48's Yuko Oshima. The catch? They were all made out of wax.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Society
May 21, 2013

Visa violators stage sit-in to stay

Visa violators kick off a five-day protest at the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau to protest plans to deport overstayers en masse on planes.
JAPAN / EXPLAINER
May 21, 2013

Fukushima No. 1 can't keep its head above tainted water

More than two years into the triple-meltdown crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant, workers continue to wage a desperate battle to keep the stricken reactors cool while trying to contain the 400 tons of radioactive water produced by the process each day.
Japan Times
WORLD
May 21, 2013

Avoid excuses, man up, Obama tells black graduates

President Barack Obama on Sunday summoned the graduates of historically black Morehouse College to "transform the way we think about manhood," urging the young men to avoid the temptation to make excuses and to take responsibility for their families and their communities.
COMMENTARY / World
May 21, 2013

Turkey's Erdogan undone by Obama and Assad

The car bombs that killed more than 40 people on May 11 in a town in southern Turkey are a reckoning for Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Japan Times
WORLD / Politics
May 20, 2013

Obama keeps fluid grip on levels of power

President Barack Obama's professed ignorance of the targeting of conservatives by one government agency and his support of tracking journalists' sources by another highlight one of the great paradoxes of his presidency: Sometimes he uses his office as aggressively as anyone who's held it; other times...
EDITORIALS
May 20, 2013

Avoiding food allergy tragedies

The death of an 11-year-old female Chofu (Tokyo) student in December 2012 prompts the education ministry to set up a panel to consider how to prevent such accidents.
COMMENTARY / World
May 20, 2013

Creating roadblocks to cuts in nuclear arms

U.S. congressional dysfunction on defense rears its head when a subcommittee chair threatens to withhold funds for implementing the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.
Japan Times
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
May 20, 2013

Product names show language creativity at work

Recently I was asked to write a blurb for a new liquid plant-nutrient. As soon as I saw the name of the product, u65e9u6839u65e9u8d77 uff08Hayane Hayaoki), I smiled at this example of linguistic creativity.
Japan Times
LIFE / WEEK 3
May 19, 2013

Fukushima photos focus on what can't be seen

Photographer Tomoki Imai has been a blur of activity since we reached the lookout point halfway up 601-meter Mount Higakure in the Futaba district of Fukushima Prefecture.
JAPAN / History / JAPAN TIMES GONE BY
May 19, 2013

Hibiya Park illuminations, Japan’s first mosque, ‘Vigorous’ Mount Fuji stymies relocation, minister resigns over war-guilt denial

Tokyo city has withdrawn the illuminations at Hibiya which it made for the benefit of the admirers of the park's azaleas.
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
May 19, 2013

Trimming the fat from Japan's problems

Why do people disagree?
EDITORIALS
May 19, 2013

Gap-year system starts

The first group of students at the University of Tokyo have submitted their plans and embarked on a new 'gap year program' to learn from the world.
Reader Mail
May 19, 2013

More serious than their parents

I notice that a lot of senior employees of traditional Japanese companies often bemoan the fact that their daughters cannot easily find desirable husbands these days. Some people describe Japanese young men today as "grass-eating boys" who are too timid to find girlfriends. Others say today's parents...
WORLD
May 18, 2013

Before tea party scandal, IRS harassed gay groups

Before there was the tea party, there was Big Mama Rag, Inc.
Japan Times
WORLD / Science & Health
May 18, 2013

Minds traumatized by disaster heal themselves

One of the largest earthquakes ever recorded hit on Boxing Day 2004. The resulting tsunami devastated huge swaths of the Indian Ocean coastline and left an estimated quarter of a million people dead across Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand. Aid agencies quickly arrived to help battered and traumatised...

Longform

Members of the nonprofit group Japan Youth Memorial Association search for the remains of dead soldiers in a cave in Okinawa Prefecture in February.
The long search for Japan’s lost soldiers